Here's the unfortunate fact about project cars: Many are never completed. Sure, they invariably begin with high hopes, but they often end up as a pile of fail hidden behind the barn. No matter how much time, talent, enthusiasm, and money are allocated, one or all are bound to run out at some point. Hot rods are never really finished, rodders like to say, not quite realizing how truly they speak. America's garage floors are strewn with permanently half-finished project cars.

2/17Murray Pfaff calculates that 10,000 man-hours (more than half of them his) were required to build the Imperial Speedster—including many long nights in his two-car garage. Murray’s girlfriend, Monique Roehl, captured the moment.

As a professional automotive artist and designer, Murray Pfaff knows this all too well. He's lost count of all the builds he's helped to get off the dime, only to see them grind to a halt before obtaining completion. And he's seen that the more ambitious the project, the less likely it is to ever see the light of day. The hours, skills, and funding required to build a top-flight car these days are considerable. It's a big job, and it's far too easy for rodders to strap on more than they can handle.

Murray has seen all this before, but it didn't stop him from embarking on a hilariously overreaching project of his own. What Murray had in his mind's eye was a radical two-place roadster, a hot rod tribute to the Chrysler Ghia and GM Motorama sports cars of the '50s. Now, the fact that these fabulous concept cars were built by world-class fabricators with unlimited budgets didn't give Murray a moment of pause. He hatched his own plan: Take an original '59 Chrysler Imperial sedan, cut the body apart in every direction, and then piece it back together in roughly the same proportions as a Shelby Cobra. The finished body would then be dropped over a Pro Touring–style chassis with a late-model Mopar Hemi powertrain and Viper independent rear suspension. The objective: an Imperial-based, two-seat sports car that would make Virgil Exner himself crack a grin. As the photos of the completed car show, objective achieved.

3/17Here's one of Murray's renderings of his scheme to create a two-seat sports car from a ginormous four-door sedan. The red areas indicate the sheetmetal to be sliced away. Look, it's so simple. Right. Slashing in every direction, the crew shortened the body 51 inches, sectioned it 3 inches, and narrowed it 8 inches. However, the cuts had to be carefully arranged to keep all the character lines and features aligned. The shortening stage was performed in five separate vertical planes.

Murray is a pro designer, but he'll be the first to tell you he's not a pro builder. This was his first ground-up project of this scale, and every bit of the work except paint, plating, and upholstery was performed in the modest two-car garage behind his Royal Oak, Michigan, home. The secret to his success, according to Murray: friends. You've got to have friends. Nine other rodders also brought their talents and efforts to bear on the project, sacrificing their evenings and weekends along with him. "All these guys contributed just as if it was their own car," Murray says. "And together we have created a car that none of us alone could have ever built."

The key piece of hardware in the construction of the Imperial Speedster, as Murray named it, was a telescoping, multi-axis body jig. The rig, fabricated from heavy steel tubing by Murray and crew, made the scary part of the job—hacking the body into a zillion pieces—manageable by keeping all the sections in alignment as the shell was shortened, sectioned, and narrowed in successive steps. "I have to admit, it was a moment when I first went in with the saw," Murray recalls. "Here I am cutting up this pretty decent car, and you know people were saying, ‘Well, we'll never see this Imperial again.' But really, it went back together surprisingly smoothly. But I wouldn't tell you it wasn't a lot of work."

4/17After three-plus years of hard labor fueled by pizza and soda, here’s the result. Dayton provided the wire wheels, 17x8 front and 18x10 rear. The 1.25-inch whitewalls on the Goodyear F1 GS-D3 tires were applied by Diamondback Classic Tires in Conway, South Carolina.

In finished form, the Speedster is almost an optical illusion; It's hard to see how all the enormous Imperial styling elements were crammed into such a petite package. Much of the cleverness is in the doors. All four doors were deskinned, then the front two-thirds of the front inner door was spliced to the rear third of the rear inner door on each side. Then the top third of the rear outer panel was patched into the front lower door- skin. As a result, the quarter-panels flow seamlessly into the doors. In side elevation, the Speedster's tailfins stretch half the length of the car, and that's part of the glory of it.

So here's one ambitious project car you can mark as finished. Well finished. Murray took careful notes of all the time involved, and he figures 10,000 man-hours for everyone involved over three and a half years. "Thank you doesn't really say it," Murray says. "Amazingly, every guy who started in on the project saw it through to the end. We all knew that we had something unique, and there were different reasons for each to be involved. Some wanted to expand their skill sets. Some did it to get out of the house. Some did it as a challenge. Some like pizza."

8/17Detailed cardboard templates were constructed and carefully fitted for all the sheetmetal work, including the recessed firewall. Check out the 392 Chrysler valve covers modified by Steve Langford to serve as ignition covers on the 6.1L late-model Hemi V8.

And now that the Imperial Speedster is done, was it worth it? "Oh, yeah. It's everything I thought it would be when I first started on it. And it's a lot more than that."